Increasingly committed to the circular economy, Lucart, the Italian manufacturer of tissue paper, airlaid products and MG paper, has joined Ellen MacArthur Foundation's Circular Economy 100 (CE100) network to realise its circular economy ambitions faster. This pre-competitive innovation programme was established to enable organisations to develop new opportunities and more quickly realise their circular economy ambitions.

Lucart, which has made sustainability and innovation in the environmental field its core values, is one of only three Italian organisations that are members of the CE100, along with Intesa Sanpaolo and Gruppo Hera.

The network focuses on collaboration, capacity building, networking and research and insights - bringing together companies to create further opportunities for cooperation and innovation.

"Quality, innovation and sustainability: these are the key words for building the future of tissue paper and of our group," explains Lucart CEO Massimo Pasquini. "This is why joining the community created by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation makes us proud of what we have achieved to date: it demonstrates our full commitment to a circular paper economy, as we like to call it.

"We hope that this cooperation will pave the way for new, challenging scenarios for the development of circular economy on a global level, covering a multitude of different sectors and projects. And we want to play an active role in this development".

In the environmental field, Lucart is a pioneering company in Europe: in 1997, it launched recycled toilet paper with Mater-Bi packs, and in 1998 it was the first company in Italy to obtain the Ecolabel. In 2010, it launched the Natural project in cooperation with Tetra Pak, creating Fiberpack, a virtuous and award-winning circular economy project, which represents the evolution of paper. This has resulted in the group recycing more than 3.6 billion beverage cartons, which, if lined up one after the other, would cover a distance equal to the circumvention of the Earth 21 times over. This has also prevented the emission of 93,800 tonnes of CO2e into the atmosphere, which is equal to the emissions of as many as 736,000 trips by car from Rome to Milan.

Lucart's production capacity exceeds 395,000 tonnes/year of paper on 12 continuous machines and 65 converting lines. Its consolidated turnover amounts to more than €450 million, with more than 1,500 employees in 10 production plants (five in Italy, one in France, one in Hungary and three in Spain).